#91 - Autonomous Teams: Why, How and Who with Andy Walker // Former Senior Tech Leader @ Skyscanner + Google

alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

Autonomy, Motivation and Purpose

Empower your team with the right type of autonomy 🚀 as we define the balance in this CTO podcast with Andy Walker, who has years of experience leadings teams at Skyscanner and Google. After 30 years in tech, Andy finally has the time to share what his hard won insights about tech leadership. You will enjoy his nuanced approach to autonomous teams, team size and work-life balance.
Listen to find out: Why the more senior you are, the less decisions you should make 🤔 How to give the right amount of autonomy by career stage 🧑‍💻 (and how to have the right conversations about it 💬) How to empower 🚀and support an autonomous team What is the ideal team size?🍕 (What happens beyond Dunbar’s Law?) What motivates your team? 🤗 (SPOILER: Autonomy, Mastery🌟, and Purpose ala Dan Pink)

• why Daily Active Users is the Wrong Metric 🫣

Listen here

BROUGHT TO YOU BY: WorkGenius and codecentric

About Andy Walker:

Andy has over 30 years experience as a software engineer, leader and coach. A ten year veteran of Google where he worked on Maps, Search and Ads and previously at Netscape and Sony. Recently he’s been focused on how to create an environment for teams to do their best work and coaching leaders to enable this. He’s currently writing about the lessons he has learned about working with people and doing ad hoc coaching and the occasional conference talk.

TIMESTAMPS (approx) (00:00) Introduction to the Alphalist Podcast (02:06) Introducing Guest: Andy Walker (02:38) Andy's Current Daily Life (03:27) What is Autonomy (04:37) The Balance of Autonomy (04:47) Autonomy in Parenting (06:28) The Importance of Autonomy in Companies (07:24) Communicate to Discover the Right Amount of Autonomy (08:15) Overview of Autonomy Across the Company (10:05) How to Align in Autonomous Teams (10:31) Progression of Autonomy from Junior to Senior (12:01) How to do Autonomy (12:51) Role of Leadership Skills in Autonomy (13:20) The Importance of Communication in Autonomy (14:01) Good Leaders Know How To Apply Leadership Best Practices (15:56) 3-Question Smell Test for Leaders (18:08) Why the best leaders make the least decisions (20:00) Who makes decisions in Multi-Disciplinary Teams (22:28) Bad Managers and Micromanagement (27:20) Effective Teams (30:26) What motivates people (inspired by Dan Pink) (31:03) How Autonomy Motivates (31:19) How Purpose Motivates (33:35) How Mastery Motivates (35:52) Ideal Size for Autonomous Teams (38:38) Ideal Team Size Varies (40:20) Work-Life Balance (41:16) Rapid Fire Questions (42:18) Biggest Mistake Leaders Make With Autonomy (42:32) Why Daily Active Users Could Be a Bad Metric (44:10) Best Prompt to Improve Work-Life Balance (48:00) Advice for New Leaders (48:18) Advice to Younger Self

Quotes:###

And when we're talking about autonomy within companies, you should understand that you're trying to give every person the most autonomy they can handle at a given point in time ….. And so what you're looking at saying is how much autonomy can you handle right now? And how do we put you in a situation where the bits where you don't have autonomy over what you're learning from so that your ability to tackle larger and more difficult things grows over time? And what tends to happen with autonomy as we don't have that conversation? So when somebody feels that they don't have appropriate decision-making power, they turn around and say, ‘You're not giving me autonomy ‘like it's necessarily a bad thing rather than the better conversation of ‘what level autonomy should you have at this point and how can we help you grow that level of autonomy’” - Andy Walker,alphalist CTO podcast #91

One of my rules of thumb as to whether I'm functioning as a leader was,” How many decisions do I have to make?” And my goal is to never have to make a single decision. This is a futile goal, because that's never going to happen. But it makes me think about how do I push the decision to the lowest part of the hierarchy as possible, so that the people closest to the work are able to have agency over what they're doing. And this should be business as usual. And in fact, if you're working on something, and you're responsible for getting it done, you should have decision-making power over 99 percent of the things in front of you. The interesting case is the edge case for that 1 percent where what you're working on may be mutually exclusive to another team. ” - Andy Walker,alphalist CTO podcast #91

About our sponsors

WorkGenius

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codecentric

The codecentric Culture and Career Podcast is unique for a company podcast. It is just employees talking freely about their daily life - from IT consulting projects they are working to imposter syndrome. We support this because we think it's pretty cool that codecentric simply lets the colleagues talk about everything, no matter what it's about - project business, Imposter sydrome, further education or parental leave in the consulting business. For us it is definitely worth a recommendation. Listen in - the codecentric Culture and Career Podcast. Note - its in German. Just go to: www.link.alphalist.com/cc